Our company is looking at upgading to new XP based workstations. Does Catia take advantage of Dual processors? Any other advice on workstation configs would be greatly apreciated.
CATIA v5 does not use dual CPUs as far as I know. At my company we have workstations from Dell with dual Xeon processors, 1Gb of RAM, Quadro4 980XGL graphic-cards and SCSI-HDs. If you don´t use your system to anything else than CATIA I would buy a very fast P4 with a 800MHz FSB, at least 2Gb of RAM, QuadroFX 2000/3000 graphic-card and a SCSI-HD. That is my personal experience when I compare the workstations at work and my own similair P4-system at home.
Catia V5, in its core program, does not make use of the dual processor capabilities. Itsmyjob was correct, Analysis (ELFINI - not GPA/GPS) and certain DMU functionality do make use of the dual processors.
As others have already pointed out, the core of V5 is not
multi-threaded, except the following applications/modules
DMU Navigator
FEA Analysis
3D Rendering